Episode 21

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Published on:

26th Mar 2025

Refaat Did Not Die, He Multiplied! Featuring Yousef Aljamal

Suchitra, Bhakti, and Madhuri invite writer, editor, and translator Yousef Aljamal for a moving and intimate conversation that honours the life, work, and enduring legacy of the late Refaat Alareer — Palestinian writer, poet, professor, and beloved mentor assassinated by Israel in December 2023. Yousef was Refaat’s student, collaborator, and close friend. Yousef assembled and edited the book If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose by Refaat Alareer which was published early this year. He speaks with clarity, wit, and tenderness about the man whose imagination helped birth an army of writers out of besieged Gaza, including the powerful collection Gaza Writes Back 

Together, the hosts and Yousef reflect on Refaat’s literary and political ethos — his belief that storytelling is resistance, that fiction outlives fact, and that freedom begins in the imagination. They unpack how Refaat fused humour with rage, literature with politics, the classroom with the battlefield. The conversation also considers the role of US universities, the complicity of elite institutions, and the radical hope fuelling a generation of students who refuse silence in the face of genocide.

The title of the episode cites Susan Abulhawa's introduction to the book If I Must Die where she writes that Refaat's death reminded her of Berta Cáceres of Honduras, "another indigenous leader who, like Refaat, was murdered because the light of her being shone too brightly...When she died, the rallying cry of the thousands who loved and followed her was, “Berta no murió, se multiplicó!”

Links to buy the books

If I Must Die: Poetry and Prose by Refaat Alareer edited by Yousef Aljamal https://orbooks.com/catalog/if-i-must-die/ 

Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine edited by Refaat Alareer

https://justworldbooks.com/books-by-title/gaza-writes-back/  

Keywords

Refaat Alareer, If I Must Die, poetry literature, poetry storytelling, resistance, genocide, student activism, Gaza, settler colonialism, humour, legacy, education, poetry, writing as survival, social media, imagination, liberation, radical pedagogy, narrative power, campus repression, academic freedom.

Hosted by

Suchitra Vijayan, Bhakti Shringarpure, and Madhuri Sastry

Guest: Yousef Aljamal

A podcast by The Polis Project

www.thepolisproject.com

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About the Podcast

It's Not You, It's The Media
Resist media gaslighting
It's Not You, It's The Media! unpacks the ways that the media manipulates narratives and makes you question your reality. You're being gaslighted. Suchitra Vijayan, Bhakti Shringarpure and Madhuri Sastry eviscerate the propaganda, set the record straight and offer moral clarity.

Suchitra Vijayan is a writer, photographer and activist. She is the founder and Executive Director of The Polis Project. For her first book, The Midnight's Border: A People's History of India, Suchitra traveled across the 9000-mile Indian border. A barrister by training, she previously worked for the United Nations war crimes tribunals in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before co-founding the Resettlement Legal Aid Project in Cairo, which gives legal aid to Iraqi refugees. She is the co-author of How Long Can the Moon Be Caged? Voices of Indian Political Prisoners (2023) which offers a lens into today's India through the lived experiences of political prisoners.

Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer and editor. She is the co-founder of Warscapes magazine which transitioned into the Radical Books Collective, a multi-faceted community building project that creates an alternative, inclusive and non-commercial approach to books and reading. Bhakti is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (2019) and editor of Literary Sudans: An Anthology of Literature from Sudan and South Sudan (2017), Imagine Africa (2017) Mediterranean: Migrant Crossings (2018) and most recently, Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War (2023).

Madhuri Sastry is a former lawyer, specializing in international and human rights law. She was the publisher of Guernica Magazine. Her political writing, cultural criticism, interviews and essays have appeared in several publications including The Nation, Guernica, Slate, Bitch and New York Magazine. She is on the editorial board at the Polis Project.